Sexual Duality Delusion

I wrote this post up in late November, and decided not to post it because I thought it might be too abrasive.

However, I changed my mind, after watching the mirror of InternetAristocrat's video "Cis-Scum".

The female brony blogger that Oleg Volk sometimes links to has come out as a man. Well, actually, it's all very complicated, so read about it yourself, I guess.

My immediate reaction to this comes in three parts, followed by a larger monologue on exactly what in the hell I think is going on here:

1. While I don't recognize the condition, I don't hate "transgendered" people (those who feel they are actually a member of the opposite sex; this post does not concern people with ambiguous genitalia) or feel repulsed by what they think about themselves. What does disturb me is when I see someone who has mutilated their body in a failed attempt to convince others that they're not really the sex they are, but it's much the same feeling as seeing someone who's been horrifically burned or who is grotesquely fat. Not to insult burn victims, of course. This is a natural reaction that possesses me against my will. My opinions on the matter are entirely separate.

2. You want to go by the name "Erin" online, be my guest. I go by a pseudonym, too.

3. Just because I think (you'll see) that transgenders are most likely deluded doesn't mean it can't hurt. On the contrary, delusion can be one of the most damaging conditions. I am sympathetic.

In the interests of getting inside your head a little, I will play your game. OK, I wake up and, just like Tom Hanks in Big, I find myself staring back at someone I don't recognize. How do I handle this? Well that would be fairly extraordinary. I might inquire to a professional about it. Or perhaps a wise-looking black man with a salt-and-pepper beard.

Did you wake up and suddenly not recognize yourself, though? I suspect not. I suspect, like me, you woke up one day when you were in middle school with a dark hair or two growing on your face. Hardly a blue-furred facelift. You looked much the same as you always did.

Maybe you didn't look the way you wanted to, or your mental image and reflection didn't match up. Loads of people have this little quirk of psychology, very few of them write extended blog posts about it. When I think of myself, it doesn't match very closely with how I actually look. Big deal.

You're disgusted with your own looks? Lots of people have this problem. Even if there's such a thing as having a female psychology and a male physiology, the fact that you find your body repulsive probably has little to do with it. After all, do you find other men repulsive? I don't mean in an intimate sense, but rather walking down the street, if you pass a bearded fellow wearing shorts, a t-shirt and a wristwatch, do you want to shy away in revulsion as if they had some gross deformity? I reserve suspicion that you do not.

It would not shock me to learn that you have BDD. Looking at yourself in the mirror and wanting to vomit isn't normal, and that must have been a helluva time growing up. Regarding your own name as something fake and unworthy is a sign of underlying distress (one of my girlfriends goes by a male name, and functions normally). I sympathize, sincerely, I do.

Finally, are you really psychologically a woman? You like guns and comic books and you
get a feeling in your loins when you see a woman (strange, most of the transgendered M-t-Fs I've seen are "lesbians"). Maybe you're a bit effeminate, but that does not a condition make.

You are a man, not a woman, and whatever psychological issues you have, it's up to you to fight through them, not to indulge them by playing pretend. Do you think that, in the long run, getting your friends to act as though you were something you're not will help you overcome your issues? Why do you think that shunning your birth name and saying you're a woman on the inside fixes the problem? The problem isn't you having the wrong name or body, it's the revulsion you have for yourself.

You said that you don't want to mutilate yourself through surgery. This is good. This is sane. You have the body you were born with, and however you feel, you should work with it. Others will, though. I've seen people that have gone under the knife, and they didn't transform themselves into something beautiful and accepted, they made it worse; they actually turned themselves into monsters. What if it's a delusion? What if you are male to the core, and you just have a body image problem? What if all transgendered people are? Are we as a culture encouraging people to mutilate themselves in service to neuroses? How horrifying is that thought?

Finally, Erin, though I don't expect we'll meet, I will not treat you as if you're a woman. I will call you "Erin" if you like, but only the same as you might call me "Wilhelm". The pronoun set I use for you is "he/him/his". I might say, "that Erin fellow is a good man, and good company, besides." I will expect you to act much the same as I would expect any man. If there's a draft, you will go to war (oh, wait, I guess that's bi-gender now. What a silly time we live in.) If there's a vote, I expect you to vote (wait, that too?). Hold on. Chivalry's dead? Men don't pay the bills? Well, shit, I guess in this day and age, I'm to treat women and men much the same, save for the pronouns I use.

Society's clearly disintegrating before me, I don't have time for delusional men who wish they were gay women!

Ice Ages Past and To Come

My opinion on climate change has always been that if you politicize the issue, no one will be able to even figure out what the hell actually is going on and, impending disaster or no, it will quickly turn into a contest of dogma.

Was the dogma wrong the entire time? Hmmm. As counter-revolutionaries living naked in our book-strewn huts in the forests far outside what they're calling "civilization" these days, what do we make of this?

Of course it's a DailyMail science article, so for all I know it has nothing to do with reality.

The stains on her white armor simply won't buff out

How many deaths is USG responsible for?

One of the great successes of US propaganda is the widespread myth that the United States and its close allies were the good guys, because Hitler killed people and they didn't.

One may point out that Stalin killed loads of people, but they will often be met with arguments that we had to side with the lesser of two evils to defeat the greater, never mind that Stalin's crimes were greater than Hitler's, and Hitler's were largely unknown (and uncommitted) at the time war was declared. Hmm.

Some reactionary elements have argued that the USG should be held partially accountable for the crimes of the Soviet regime, as it was to a large degree an enabler. This is a very grey area, but the most interesting part of the issue is that USG herself is responsible for untold mass murder and other heinous crimes, all of which is strictly ignored by official history.

Herbert Butterfield rocking out in a mask of red and black paint

I'm hearing echoes of Butterfield in this:

As you sit in your quiet home, surrounded by peace, comfort and civilization...

Do you, listener, remember those memories...

Grand and tearful, which still, after hundreds of years,

Remain now radiant with the brightness of sunlight,

And now darkening, like indelible bloodstains...

The variegated pages of history.

Can your thoughts, torpid with repose,

Transport themselves back to the horrors and joys of the past...

Not straying indifferently from one thing to another which excites your curiosity,

But taking a warm and vital interest, as if you yourself stood in the midst of those struggles,

Now long since fought out... bled in them, conquered or fell in them,

And felt your heart beat with hope or apprehension according as fortune smiled or betrayed...

Standing on the heights of history, looking far around the wild arena of human destiny,

Can you transfer yourself into the well of the past?

A life physically buried and decayed, but spiritually inmost,

Which constitutes the essence and substance of history...

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart,

Waging all things in the balance of reason?

Is not rather the genius of history like an eternally blooming maiden, full of fire,

With a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?

Therefore, if you have the capacity to suffer or rejoice with the generation that had been...

To hate with them... to love with them... to be transported to admire, to despise,

To curse as they have done - in a word:

To live among them with your whole heart and not alone with your cold, reflecting judgement...

... then follow me.

I will lead you down into the well.

My hand is weak and my sketch humble, but your heart will guide you better than I.

Upon that I rely... and begin.

 

Dat Finnish accent.

Portrait of an American Woman

Remember that burning car I mentioned earlier? He's in it.

No wonder American families aren't having kids; the men already have to deal with their juvenile, entitled wives.

Popular Science is Bad Science II: Decline

Your great-grandfathers split the atom for the first time.

Hikikomori - The Next Generation

Literally.

As welfare increases, good jobs with sane employers become harder to find, and home comforts become ever more in reach, hikikomori - in the US called "basement-dwellers," "neckbeards," and "80% of the My Little Pony franchise fanbase" - will remain on the rise.

This isn't a bang. It's not a whimper, either. Shall the world end with a squick?

CONGRATULATIONS ON THE ASSUMED DESTRUCTION OF YOUR HOMOSEXUAL ENEMIES, PROGS

I've gotta hand it to progressives: When they want a group of people gone, they have a way of doing it that leaves the affected party grinning from ear to ear... Before they're exterminated, of course.

Consider the late "gay problem". Gays have long been a thorn in the sides of progressives, showing up to dinner parties with far superior casseroles, correcting their style, and indulging their women's shopping addiction. The problem was, how to exterminate them without looking like bigoted dicks? Well, there's an app for that.

The social institutions that kept gays reproducing, which ensured that a society's party decorations would always be fabulous, that its casseroles would always be delicious, and that its men would always be well-dressed for business meetings, became the target. The noble wives of gay men, who ensured the perpetuity of gay traits, became "covers", and made fine targets for ridicule in the low media.

Now, every good crusade needs its barbarians. The conservative puppet-arm was harnessed for this, as usual, to provide the "oppressive" atmosphere needed to make gays feel well and truly disenfranchised. Replete with religious fanatics screaming about sexual preferences being a sign of the end times, this move was highly effective in convincing the gays of their own disenfranchisement.

Gays joined the cause in droves. Lesser progs were called from every tumblr blog to fight the good fight, and preserve the "civil liberties" of gays. As always, sentiment was paramount, and the consequences of their actions (which were, of course, intended) went unspoken. Under a flood of red and pink Facebook profile pictures, rainbow-colored website headers, and condescending crocodile humor targeting "hateful people", the straw enemy was assaulted.

Thus, DOMA, the Great Evil constructed of Baptist sermons and pure hate, was struck down, and gays were free... Complicit in their own silent ethnic cleansing which would be complete in only a few generations, as their genes faded away.

Decades from now, young progs will look up at a monument of George Takei and think of his great accomplishments in the destruction of his own kind, and all the straight progs will revel in their ugly concrete buildings, burnt casseroles, and bizarre businesswear.

Alcohol and Aboriginal Amerindians

A very interesting summary of the subject.

I was discussing this subject with Girlfriend'', where I supposed that the mesoamerican tribes probably were practically drowning in alcohol (at least relatively speaking) due to their farming practices, and that alcohol consumption pre-Columbus could probably be more or less correlated to farming. This appears essentially correct.

Just because some Muslims are terrorists doesn't mean the group as a whole is violent

That they keep being violent does.

It's interesting that they never say in the article that the rioters are Muslims. Uh, yeah, the "immigrant" riots were sparked by a cop killing a man wielding a machete.

Don't listen to this gal; don't marry

Read this article first.

Laura makes a pretty good point, and a compelling argument. If I may express her point in a metaphor, she's basically saying that the car still runs, and though it has quirks and you could die going over Yungas Road in it, it's worth it to keep it running.

The problem with her argument isn't that cars are bad or that keeping the idea of the car alive isn't noble, it is that the car is on fire.

X? In my Y?

What is this freedom bullshit?

Oh, that.

The great extent of modern cleverness

...Reaches only to idiot housewives, apparently.

A Mouthful of Marbles

I dare you to try it; the next time you're at dinner with folks, and they ask you about your political persuasion, tell them you're a "neoreactionary".

If Mr. Plinkett has to mumble through your neologism, it's probably not a very good one. To simulate this at home, get drunk, shove five marbles in your mouth, and say "neoreactionary".

Do you really want one, all-encompassing term for a collection of racists, pick-up-artists, disillusioned bureaucrats, and angry old men? Do these people even get along at parties?

Compare and Contrast

From Armarium Magnum:

His last point in the quote above is more evidence of his lack of understanding of the period he's working so hard to distort and then condemn.  There certainly were regular condemnations of curiositas amongst monks.  In his ignorance of the period and because of his distorting Whiggish prejudices, Greenblatt has decided this means "intellectual curiosity" and claims this means they may have copied the works he likes so much, but they can't have actually thought about them or discussed them as this was forbidden.  In fact, the word refers to curiosity about others, gossip and idle chatter - something probably common in small enclosed communities of celibate men - and had nothing to do with intellectual curiosity.

vs.

The greatest irony, of course, being that real, honest curiosity about the sacred tenets of the modern church is discouraged.

Fewer days off than a 12th century peasant

Past writers who imagined the future thought that as machines saved our time, we would have more time for leisure. That has not happened. Instead, since no one is self-sufficient, we must work in sales and marketing to convince someone with money to trade cash for our trinket, so that we can have purchasing power to access the natural bounty of the land. Average work hours declined for a century – and then started curving back upwards as the everyone switched the zero sum battle of sales and marketing. The future is here, and it is the sales desk at Dunder Mifflin.

 Oh dear, we're so fscked. Do read the whole thing.

Oops

That sounds like rather a silly mistake to make.

Of course, I love the line at the end:

Thomas Herndon 's view is that austerity policies are counter-productive. 

Well, duh, if people will just keep lending you money, why would you ever waste time and effort trying to pay it off? I should get published! I'll call it The Single Mom Theory of Economics.

The Children's Crusade

Who would deny that this man is a great latter-day American patriot? He is standing up for your rights, and indeed has suffered incarceration that eventually will lead to a further proliferation liberty in the nation!

Well, that's the rosy picture that some would paint. What's the reality? Can anyone really say? Yes, I think I can.

C. J. Grisham has a history of... Embellishment. Some of his best comrades, I think, would be very upset with him over this. Then, is he crusading for us, or his own ego?

"SHUT UP, I'M TALKING!"

Does this man handle himself like someone who earned a Bronze Star? No, of course not, because he didn't. He is a fat child who's lollipop has been taken away. Waaaaugh, give me back my tactical carbine!

"I carry a rifle any time I walk around because there are feral hogs and cougars and things like that.”

Really? I'm not unfamiliar with the area around Temple, Texas, and far from it being so infested with hogs and cougars that you have to carry around rifles everywhere you go, it's remarkable if you see an armadillo. If I were an officer in the area, and I saw someone carrying an AR-15, I, too, would be a little suspicious.

What was he thinking when he unnecessarily clipped his rifle and camera to his completely inappropriate backpack as they set out that morning? Is it possible that he just felt more badass carrying a rifle, and he knew he might get into trouble, and he wanted to make sure the cameras were rolling when it inevitably happened? More than possible, I think. What was it he was discharged for? Oh yeah, mental problems.

Should we give assclowns like him attention? Yes, so long as it is mockery. Social martyrdom is what he wants (I'd be surprised if he wanted actual martyrdom, seeing as how he's a coward), but I doubt he prepared for being called out as the child he really is.

Andrew Tuohy has a less scalding take on the incident over on his blog. I owe him for the link to Grisham's inflated claims about his service.

The "Rescue" Pet Fad: Evil

I don't really have anything else to add to this article, save that everything he says is right and true, and that those obsessed with or using as status levers "rescue" animals are the perpetrators of a great perversion.

Repost Week, Cont'd

Why fat women should be sent to prison.

Sterilization, it seems to me, would be easier on the economy, but a functional society that could enact such a policy probably negates the problem in the first place by not having poor incentive structures for women. Catchy title, though.

Here's some supporting evidence for his uncited JAAP quote.

Intelligent Design

Truly, he is an eldritch god, or perhaps Dionysus.

Popular Science is Junk Science, Repost Edition

Oh yeah, we're doing great on the science front.

Homeschooling

This article, in favor of homeschooling, gives me an excuse to do some article analysis. I like it, because I agree with the author on some things, but think a number of his points are completely absurd and/or banal. Let's begin.

I accept this award on behalf of all the fine teachers I've known over the years who've struggled to make their transactions with children honorable ones, men and women who are never complacent, always questioning, always wrestling to define and redefine endlessly what the word "education" should mean. A Teacher of the Year is not the best teacher around, those people are too quiet to be easily uncovered, but he is a standard-bearer, symbolic of these private people who spend their lives gladly in the service of children. This is their award as well as mine.

All the best teachers I've ever known were loud, offensive, rambunctious  and always on the verge of getting fired or transferred.

We live in a time of great school crisis.

Yup. In fact, you don't really need the word "school" in there at all.

Our children rank at the bottom of nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing and arithmetic. At the very bottom.

What if you only count the white and Asian children, I suddenly crimethought?

The world's narcotic economy is based upon our own consumption of the commodity, if we didn't buy so many powdered dreams the business would collapse - and schools are an important sales outlet. Our teenage suicide rate is the highest in the world and suicidal kids are rich kids for the most part, not the poor. In Manhattan fifty per cent of all new marriages last less than five years. So something is wrong for sure.

 A bit of a non-sequitur, but I'm willing to humor him. I wonder if he laments the use of drugs, or the underlying problems they imply? I honestly wonder how the drug use chart would break down according to race and age. I wonder what the correlation is between drug use and career 'floppage', college dropout rates, and early death.

We seem to have lost our identity.

APPLAUSE 

Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent - nobody talks to them anymore and without children and old people mixing in daily life a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the name "community" hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. In some strange way school is a major actor in this tragedy just as it is a major actor in the widening guilt among social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and sleep on the streets.

The sudden jump from applause lights to this is jarring, but I always have a pleasant reaction to good sense and truth.

I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very hard, the institution is psychopathic - it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to different cell where he must memorize that man and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.

Some of the more obvious bits of this paragraph are true, but two falsehoods stick out at me. Firstly, while it is true that a great many (white and Asian) people are stuck in jobs they hate that are completely unfulfilling, the sentiment that "schools don't teach anything except how to obey orders", besides being an applause light begs the question "why aren't former public school students better at obeying orders?"

I also mislike his implied sentiment that students should only be forced to do work that they want to do. In school, all I wanted to do was screw around. Does this mean I should be allowed to fuck your girlfriend? Of course most people should be schooled for one focused talent, but this doesn't imply it should be a talent of their choosing. Further, for the greatest, brightest, most driven who are destined to be the next governors, cardinals, and kings, a diverse, formidable education is not just best, but necessary.

Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted - sometimes with guns - by an estimated eighty per cent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880's when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.

Massachusetts, like the Nazis, is a perennial enemy who crops up to threaten righteousness wherever it flourishes.

 I don't think we'll get rid of schools anytime soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we're going to change what is rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the school institution "schools" very well, but it does not "educate" - that's inherent in the design of the thing. It's not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent, it's just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing.

I think he just coined the name of my future metal band.

Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.To a very great extent, schools succeed in doing this.

Aaah! Dystopia! But never a dystopia of freedom.

But our society is disintegrating, and in such a society, the only successful people are self-reliant, confident, and individualistic - because the community life which protects the dependent and the weak is dead.

I'm not sure whether he's saying something I agree with, or whether this is just libertarian drivel.

The products of schooling are, as I've said, irrelevant. Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on the telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal but as human beings they are useless. Useless to others and useless to themselves.

He thinks the blame lies solely on our schools - a great deal of it does - but what he fails to realize is that by withdrawing his children from public school he is withdrawing them from a major organ of the Cathedral. He may yet only realize this when his first daughter comes back from college with a navel ring, a few tattooes, and a bun in the oven.

The daily misery around us is, I think, in large measure caused by the fact that - as Paul Goodman put it thirty years ago - we force children to grow up absurd. Any reform in schooling has to deal with its absurdities.It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety, indeed it cuts you off from your own part and future, scaling you to a continuous present much the same way television does.It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home demanding that you do its "homework"."How will they learn to read?" you say and my answer is "Remember the lessons of Massachusetts." When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them.

For all its faults, I rather like this sub-tract. Especially since I am anti-homework.

But keep in mind that in the United States almost nobody who reads, writes or does arithmetic gets much respect. We are a land of talkers, we pay talkers the most and admire talkers the most, and so our children talk constantly, following the public models of television and schoolteachers. It is very difficult to teach the "basics" anymore because they really aren't basic to the society we've made.

An astute observation, indeed!

Two institutions at present control our children's lives - television and schooling, in that order.

Also known as Azathoth's right and left arms.

Both of these reduce the real world of wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice to a never-ending, non-stopping abstraction. In centuries past the time of a child and adolescent would be occupied in real work, real charity, real adventures, and the realistic search for mentors who might teach what you really wanted to learn. A great deal of time was spent in community pursuits, practicing affection, meeting and studying every level of the community, learning how to make a home, and dozens of other tasks necessary to become a whole man or woman.

Those who hear the instigator's call are quick to give all that up for a slim chance at glory.

But here is the calculus of time the children I teach must deal with:Out of the 168 hours in each week, my children sleep 56. That leaves them 112 hours a week out of which to fashion a self.My children watch 55 hours of television a week according to recent reports. That leaves them 57 hours a week in which to grow up.My children attend school 30 hours a week, use about 6 hours getting ready, going and coming home, and spend an average of 7 hours a week in homework - a total of 45 hours. During that time, they are under constant surveillance, have no private time or private space, and are disciplined if they try to assert individuality in the use of time or space. That leaves 12 hours a week out of which to create a unique consciousness. Of course, my kids eat, and that takes some time - not much, because they've lost the tradition of family dining, but if we allot 3 hours a week to evening meals, we arrive at a net amount of private time for each child of 9 hours.It's not enough. It's not enough, is it? The richer the kid, or course, the less television he watches but the rich kid's time is just as narrowly proscribed by a somewhat broader catalog of commercial entertainments and his inevitable assignment to a series of private lessons in areas seldom of his actual choice.

I see he adheres to "the goal of life is to end up with the best stories" theory of existence. Coincidentally, so do I.

And these things are oddly enough just a more cosmetic way to create dependent human beings, unable to fill their own hours, unable to initiate lines of meaning to give substance and pleasure to their existence. It's a national disease, this dependency and aimlessness, and I think schooling and television and lessons - the entire Chautauqua idea - has a lot to do with it.

I see where he's going with this. Someone get Dan Brown on the phone.

Think of the things that are killing us as a nation - narcotic drugs, brainless competition, recreational sex, the pornography of violence, gambling, alcohol, and the worst pornography of all - lives devoted to buying things, accumulation as a philosophy - all of them are addictions of dependent personalities, and that is what our brand of schooling must inevitably produce.

OK, grandpa. I'll take all the dead Jesuses off my crucifixes.

I want to tell you what the effect is on children of taking all their time from them - time they need to grow up - and forcing them to spend it on abstractions. You need to hear this, because no reform that doesn't attack these specific pathologies will be anything more than a facade.

1. The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world. This defies the experience of thousands of years. A close study of what big people were up to was always the most exciting occupation of youth, but nobody wants to grow up these days and who can blame them? Toys are us.

1. The children I teach have almost no curiosity and what they do have is transitory; they cannot concentrate for very long, even on things they choose to do. Can you see a connection between the bells ringing again and again to change classes and this phenomenon of evanescent attention?

1. The children I teach have a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is inextricably linked to today. As I said before, they have a continuous present, the exact moment they are at is the boundary of their consciousness.

1. The children I teach are ahistorical, they have no sense of how past has predestined their own present, limiting their choices, shaping their values and lives.

1. The children I teach are cruel to each other, they lack compassion for misfortune, they laugh at weakness, and they have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly.

1. The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candor. My guess is that they are like many adopted people I've known in this respect - they cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behavior borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves to be the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy so intimate relationships have to be avoided.

1. The children I teach are materialistic, following the lead of schoolteachers who materialistically "grade" everything - and television mentors who offer everything in the world for free.

1. The children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in the presence of new challenges. This is frequently masked by surface bravado, or by anger or aggressiveness but underneath is a vacuum without fortitude.

Once again, we are ripped out of his libertarian-puritan dreamworld into the reality he so valiantly faces daily. This list is a grabbing diagnosis of the disease that ails the Azathothjugend.

 Time for a return to democracy, individuality, and family. I've said my piece.

I've skipped to the end here. Essentially, this wraps up the last 15 paragraphs of the article. A steady stream of meaningless platitudes punctuated by some mildly interesting anecdotes. Yawn.

I review Django Unchained

I sat down to watch Django Unchained with one of my girlfriends, with whom I was chatting, and decided to post the transcript as the review itself. Let's begin.

You can even read along while you watch if you synchronize the timestamps with the start of the movie.

7:10 PM me: Start

7:11 PM her: I like this song.

7:12 PM It's got a certain... exuberance.

 me: Why are they in the West?

  I thought this was a movie set in the South?

 her: Wow, this beginning reminds me a lot of the Kill Bill series.

 me: They're clearly in like New Mexico

  Yes

  Because it's Quentin Tarantino

  Same dude who did Kill Bill

7:13 PM her: That movie wasn't necessarily in the West, either.

 me: No, but this one is set in the South

 her: Dunno man.

 me: Clearly, they're not very good slaves, if they made their master waltz all the way out to New Mexico

7:14 PM her: Hah, Texas.

 me: My BS detector is firing

  So, they're mistreating the slaves pretty badly; that's apparent

  So they don't care about them much

7:15 PM Why, then, did they run all the way out to wherever they were to get them?

  If they're so cheap that they can just beat them up like that?

7:16 PM her: Haha.

7:17 PM None of this strikes me as unrealistic, though.

 me: None of it?

  Pretty much all of it is absurd

  Why are they in the middle of nowhere?

7:18 PM her: Well, the acting certainly seems really off.

 me: I mean, it's a fantasy

  I get that

7:19 PM her: But um, traveling from place to place through the middle of nowhere.

 me: But there are so many conceits about slaveowners that don't make any fucking sense

 her: Especially to get to a center of trade, doesn't seem very weird.

  Hehe.

7:20 PM This is a fantasy, though, for sure.

 me: Yeah? But if they'll go out to the center of nowhere to pick these guys up

  Why are they being so awful to them?

7:21 PM her: I think it took a lot of walking or carriage travel to get to anywhere, really.

  And although they'd probably take a lot better care of inanimate or livestock inventory,

7:22 PM me: The gore is amazing

  I am going to have to pause it there, however

7:23 PM 12:45

Can we do it!?

No, we can't.

Matryoshka Presidents

A fake executive within a fake executive within a...

Conservatives can be so adorable sometimes.

A Picture Worth a Thousand Groans

That about sums up the modern American marriage, doesn't it?

Microgrievance in Microcosm

Do read this article written by a woman with celiac disease, complaining about how greater awareness of her condition has caused her some easily circumvented social difficulty.

In sum, the gluten-free revolution (which sounds like the name of the lamest peasant uprising ever) has made her life much, much better, but then it made it slightly less better, so she writes an article on Jezebel enlightening everyone about this massive injustice, instead of, I dunno, say, informing the waiter that she really is celiac, and she really does need gluten-free food.

Glad we're all on the same page here.

Something new on Return of Kings

Return of Kings is made up of three basic kinds of content: Horseshit, shit that we've heard before, and shit Roosh says.

There's now a fourth category.

Now, The Harem, The Tribe, And The Pride, isn't perfect (for starters, I really don't think the "A" in "And" should be capitalized), but it grabs a hold of an important idea.

Personally, I think he missed one: The Others. Others are pretty much all enemies until proven friends. In some parts of this country, it's difficult to imagine that such human enemies still exist, but they absolutely do, and I'm not just talking about thugs with knives who want the contents of your wallet.

One could argue that you might split The Others into The Others and The Enemy, but this is more a distinction in how well you know all these Others than anything else.

Copywrong

This is a bit like saying that if a photographer takes a picture of you, anyone else who wants to use that photograph for something has to ask your mother for permission.

If copyright law were this simple, we wouldn't have copyright lawyers.

Backlog

Fourteen treatises waste away as mere drafts in my posts folder.

Maybe I should stop having sex with so many exotic women and get on finishing a few of them.

Bullying

I covered this topic previously. It's fascinating how Progism fastidiously attacks anything that looks like it might help people be better adjusted, functional members of society.

Oh, well when you explain it like that...

It still makes no sense.

But that's OK, when you have the pulpit, and what you're saying makes the congregation feel good.

My favorite bit was that he fails to explain how blacks having a month makes any of these problems - real or imagined - any better. The connection between suffering injustice and getting a month in your honor is assumed to be understood.

My second-favorite bit was the underlying implication throughout the video that these problems are "left over" from slavery/Jim Crow. This is a bit confusing, because old timers that I've talked to are of the virtually unanimous opinion that blacks have gotten steadily less civilized since the thirties, which would mean we don't look twice at the shifty black guy in the mall because he's descended from slaves... His race earned that prejudice sometime during and/or after the Civil Rights movement. Huh that doesn't sound like what Colonel Swipple was trying to say in his video...

Well, you know, all those old farts are enemies of the Revolution, anyway.

Something for the paleo-diet crowd

Apparently, operating outside of our evolutionary parameters is a bad thing.

The next agricultural reformation, if there is one, will most likely come in making the foods that aren't outside our dietary parameters abundant and cheap.

H/T Reid Farmer, by way of Querencia.

A look at your future, through the Ebony Ball...

This is a pretty tightly-written article, that I think accurately describes the phenomenon.

I don't think the decline of white America will be the same as what happened to black America, but taking a good look at black culture today gives a strong hint of what's to come. For the most sobering look, move into a black neighborhood for a few months.

Martial Distractions

What, ragtag insurgencies are usually unsuccessful against professional militaries? I've been lied to!

Well, that's what you get for listening to the Lord of Lies.

Also on WeaponsMan is this snippet about how the Cathedral continues to screw the military, lest they get the impression that they have real power.

Their Symbol A Harpy, of Woman and Bald Eagle...

Having dated few foreign women, I couldn't validate or deny this post by Mav.

However, the idea that American women are roont is an intriguing one, which suggests that the corruption goes further than I had previously considered.

Working as Intended

Clearly.

Literally any coherent central authority overlooking this situation would find it absurd and devote a considerable portion of his day to making sure such an embarrassment didn't happen again.

Thus, the case's existence is essentially diagnostic of there being no such authority. Truthers can rest easy, I suppose.

New World Order

This map gives us so much to talk about:

At first glance, it looks remarkably like that mythical Nazi map detailing their planned takeover of the world, you know, the one that doesn't exist.

The mistake is easy to make; this is a map drawn up by would-be conquers of the 20.4st Century world, just not the sharply-dressed kind.

Of course, Gomberg, so far as we know, was not involved in government at any level, and he was probably some American Nazi sympathizer. In fact, 'Maurice Gomberg' was probably the pen name of Charles Lindbergh. Our cathedral still stands, a house of stained, graffitied concrete, and our dinosaur bones remain fake.

That is, as long as you can ignore the FDR quotes plastered across the bottom of the map.

All joking aside, what's remarkable about this map is how wrong it is. If this were a Nazi map, a good Prog could sit back in their chair with a satisfying sigh and grin, and ruminate over how we did it, we stopped them, that this map is representative of a terrible reality that we prevented coming to pass!

But... The victors shown in the map did win the war and did carve up the world according to their whims... So then, why doesn't the map of, say, 1968 look at all like Gomberg's opus?

It's probably because Gomberg was crazy and not at all because Azathoth, being a blind idiot, doesn't organize his universe along rational, organized lines that suggest central planning to the casual observer.

Or maybe he does, and he just finds it amusing to publish arbitrary "national" boundaries to confuse and bewilder his subjects.

P.S. It leaves me completely in stitches that this map was completed before Pearl Harbor.

(Yes, I've been reading the Radish. It's better than it sounds. fr srs)

Studio Killers

I didn't know Roissy had a band:

Naturally, feminists in the year 37013 will cite Cherry's fat arms, pig thighs, cankles, lazy, easy-access dress, runny eyeshadow, and dead whore eyes as typical of male taste in women in the 21st Century.

The three men who make up Studio Killers have an extremely subtle and funny sense of humor.

Read between the lies

This is hilarious in the context of this.

For the full effect, read Moldbug first.

Tolkien was a racist

Aaron Diaz has a post about racism in Middle Earth. Relevant quote here:

It’s also important to keep in mind that none of the races in Middle-Earth are meant to literally correspond with those in the modern world. Hobbits are inspired by the rural English, but modern English people aren’t descended from Hobbits, nor are brown-skinned people from Harad actually ancestors of modern people from North Africa.  My point is that modern or historical allegories are rare, if ever, present in Tolkien’s writings. Tolkien hated allegory, and it would be poor critical analysis to search for deliberate real-world comparisons.

orly?

Here's a video in which Tolkien describes the gold-loving dwarves thus: "Couldn't you say in many ways they remind you of the Jews?" (6:58) In that same video, you hear him describe hobbits as "rather like an allegory for the human race" and "suggest rustic English people."

Tolkien was absolutely a racist by today's standards, and the various races of Middle-Earth are absolutely allegorical representations of different ethnic groups from Tolkien's time. To say that Tolkien hated allegory is a bit of a stretch; he was best buds with C. S. Lewis, after all. There is that one quote about him "cordially disliking" allegory, but I wonder how he would have reconciled that with the above audio clip. It is perhaps using allegory to instruct that Tolkien disliked, because he seems to use allegory often to observe. I'm no scholar of Tolkien, having read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, and that's about it, so I'll stop there in my dispelling of Diaz's notions.

Progs, of which Diaz is an almost exemplar specimen, love Tolkien, though, and simply couldn't bear the idea that he was a racist.